Advertising and marketing represents a significant ongoing expense for most sellers and/or providers of consumer goods and services. Herein sellers and/or providers of consumer goods and services are referred to collectively as “sellers”. In order to most efficiently use their marketing and/or advertising resources, most sellers would prefer to access and/or advertise to consumers having attributes that are particularly desirable to the seller and/or make the seller's product and/or service particularly applicable to the consumer. For instance, a seller of business related products may be particularly interested in targeting consumers who own, operate, and/or are associated with the management of a business. Herein, consumers that own, operate, and/or are associated with the management of a business are collectively referred to as “business managing consumers”.
Traditionally, sellers were typically made aware that a consumer might be an owner, operator and/or manager of a business through the business itself, i.e., the sellers accessed the business managing consumers by contacting the business. However, with the event of electronic commerce, numerous small and/or home based businesses have arisen. As a result, many traditional methods for determining that a given business managing consumer might be an owner, operator and/or manager of a business, and/or avenues for accessing business managing consumers, are often no longer available.
The situation discussed above is not only problematic for the seller, but the business managing consumers are also deprived the opportunity to receive special offers, pricing, discounts, and products that are often available to them by virtue of there business managing consumer status.
Despite the potential advantages to both sellers and business managing consumers of identifying business managing consumers, there currently is often no information, or not complete enough information, available to the seller to accurately identify a given consumer as a business managing consumer. In addition, even in the few cases where the limited information about a given consumer is available, the information is typically obtained from a single source, such as transactional data associated with a single credit card account, and is therefore incomplete, and the information is typically only available to larger retailers, advertisers and other sellers, such as the retailer offering the credit card account that is the single source of information.
As noted above, as a result of the situation discussed above, not only are sellers of business related goods and services denied the ability to identify and target particularly desirable business managing consumers for distribution of offers, but the desirable business managing consumers are also denied savings that would otherwise be provided to them through the discounts and/or products that would be offered to them, if the information were available to identify them. Consequently, the current situation represents a disservice to both sellers and business managing consumers.